Browser add-on updated to slaughter Firesheep

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has updated its popular web browser security tool to guard against attacks waged by the Firesheep script-kiddie snoop kit.

HTTPS Everywhere 0.9.0 has been updated to force websites such as Facebook and Twitter to activate a secure flag in cookies used to authenticate users on those websites, said EFF Senior Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. By forcing the sites to send the authentication cookies only when a connection is protected by secure sockets layer encryption, man-in-the-middle attacks like the ones launched by cookie-jacking Firesheep are thwarted.

“By forcing cookies to Secure, HTTPS Everywhere adds protection against Firesheep that site operators should have but failed to provide,” said Chris Palmer, an EFF technology director who also worked on the project.

Although the web has been vulnerable to such attacks for more than a decade, many webmasters still don't follow best practices when granting users access to restricted parts of a site. A case in point, the latest version of HTTPS Everywhere breaks parts of Facebook that can only send authentication cookies over unprotected HTTP channels. That means that using the updated tool with Facebook chat and certain apps isn't possible – at least until changes are made to parts of social networking site.

The update also works with several widely used cloud-based services, including Amazon storage service s3.amazonaws.com and twimg.com, reducing the problems when one of those sites is used by Twitter, Facebook or another website. It has also been updated to work with more websites, including Bit.ly, Cisco, Dropbox, Evernote and GitHub.

HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox plugin that, like NoScript, is a must-have for security-minded users of the open-source browser. It was released in June by the EFF and members of the Tor Project. It has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.

The code behind the add-on is based in part on the Strict Transport Security response header that's under consideration by the Internet Engineering Task Force as a way for websites and browsers to exchange data only when an encrypted connection is being used. Eventually, the technology will probably be widely available. For now, it's available for only a small smattering of websites and browsers. ®